The Miracle at Speedy Motors

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Fat lady: you watch out! And you too, the one with the big glasses. You watch out too!

  She let the paper drop to the floor. Sensing that something was wrong, Mma Makutsi stepped forward and picked up the letter and read it out loud.

  “There’s no signature,” she said simply. “Where can I file it if there is no signature?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  A WOMAN OF NO FAMILY

  YOU SIMPLY HAVE to put some things out of your mind, Mma Ramotswe told herself as Mma Makutsi ushered the client into the office. Mma Makutsi’s reaction to the anonymous letter had been exemplary. She had read out the contents in a voice that remained resolutely level and then, without any comment, had raised the issue of where the letter might be filed. That was more than mere coolness of head—that was bravery, especially since the letter-writer had included Mma Makutsi in his crude threat.

  She assumed that it was a man, as such a letter would never have been written by a woman. It was not that women never threatened physical violence—they did, even if not as readily as men did. One of the giveaways, as far as Mma Ramotswe was concerned, was the way in which she herself had been described. One woman would not describe another as…traditionally built in that insulting way. All women knew that traditional build was something that could happen to anyone, and would not abuse another for it. Nor would a woman single out another woman’s glasses for dismissive attention; hair and skin were the things a spiteful woman would notice—not glasses. No, the writer of the letter was a man, and a man who was, she suspected, consumed by envy. Nobody but an envious person, she thought, would write an anonymous letter of that sort.

  Mma Ramotswe was still feeling shocked when Mma Makutsi, who had tucked the letter into an open file at the front of the cabinet, noticed the car drawing up outside.

  “That lady is early,” she observed. “She is parking next to your van. She is trying to get a bit of shade for her car.”

  Mma Ramotswe pulled herself together. She would put the letter out of her mind and give her full attention to her client. Letters like that were best ignored. Their writers wanted one to worry—that was the whole point of writing them. They never meant any of the threats they made; if they really wanted to harm somebody, then they went ahead and did it. Threateners threatened; doers did.

  Now, standing up behind her desk, as she always did when a client entered the room, Mma Ramotswe reached out to shake hands with the woman who had written that other, quite different letter to her.

  “My name is Manka Sebina,” said the woman. “You have not met me before, Mma, but I have seen you. I have seen you over at that fabric store in the African mall. I have seen you going in there.”

  Mma Ramotswe laughed good-naturedly. “This is a small town still,” she said. “You cannot go out without being seen! And it is always when you’re doing something like shopping or treating yourself to a doughnut. That is when you’re seen. You’re never seen when you’re doing something good, like going to church.”

  The woman sat down. “But I have seen you doing that too, Mma,” she said. “I have seen you going into the Anglican cathedral opposite the hospital. And I saw you outside after the service once. Drinking tea with Bishop Mwamba.”

  Mma Ramotswe stared at her visitor, bemused. “Perhaps you should be a detective yourself, Mma,” she said. As she spoke, she glanced in Mma Makutsi’s direction, wondering what her assistant made of this. Was it nosiness? Or was it something else? There were people who took an excessive interest in the affairs of others, of people whom they did not know—stalkers, they were called. Mma Ramotswe wondered whether she had by unfortunate chance acquired a stalker and whether this woman sitting before her could be the person who had written the anonymous letter…in which case the man who had written the letter was really a woman after all.

  Mma Sebina smiled nervously. “No, please do not misunderstand me, Mma. I was not looking out for you specially. It’s just that here in Gaborone we can’t help but notice people who stand out.” She met Mma Ramotswe’s eyes directly, but only for a short time before her gaze fell away. That was the way it was in Botswana—one engaged sideways, one did not stare in a direct and challenging way. Mma Sebina was well brought up, obviously; she knew. “And you see, Mma, you are the only lady detective in this town. That is why everybody knows who you are. They say, ‘She is the detective, that woman. There she is.’”

  Mma Ramotswe’s suspicions quickly evaporated. What Mma Sebina said was undoubtedly true. There were many people in Gaborone who had a completely unrealistic idea of what a private detective did, and imagined that she was some sort of secret agent engaged in all sorts of dramatic goings-on. Whereas the reality was that her life was really rather mundane, involving routine inquiries that were often no more demanding or dramatic than looking in the telephone directory or checking up on debt judgements handed down by the Gaborone magistrates’ court. It was understandable, perhaps, that people with an unrealistic view of her job should notice her and pass comment, and it was harmless enough; after all, she noticed people and wondered what they were up to. Only the other day she had seen one of her neighbours coming out of a shop carrying four large red buckets and a coil of plastic hosing. She had wondered what he could possibly want four buckets for, and it had occurred to her that he might be thinking of brewing beer and starting an illegal drinking den, a shebeen. That would be appalling, if it happened, as shebeens attracted rowdy people in large numbers, and it would be the end of all peace in Zebra Drive if a shebeen were to open up there.

  But the business in hand was Mma Sebina, the woman sitting in front of her, not buckets and shebeens and the mysterious doings of neighbours. She looked at Mma Sebina and made a mental note of what she and Mma Makutsi called the essential particulars. They had not invented the term, having found it in the pages of her vade mecum, Clovis Andersen’s The Principles of Private Detection. “When you meet somebody for the first time,” wrote Clovis Andersen, “make sure that you note the essential particulars. That means those aspects of their appearance which might be relevant to the case. You can ignore incidentals—the fact that a shoelace is frayed at the end or that there is a small stain on a jacket. That sort of thing is not an essential particular because a frayed shoelace or a stain on a piece of clothing tells us nothing about that person—they are things that can happen to anybody. But if a watch is worn on the right wrist rather than the left, if an item of clothing is particularly expensive, or if fingernails are bitten down to the quick, that can tell us something about who that person is, about what that person is like.”

  Now, running a discreet eye up and down Mma Sebina—or up and down that part of her which was visible above the edge of her desk—Mma Ramotswe noted the neat, middle-cost clothing; the well-groomed but not ostentatiously braided hair; the carefully plucked eyebrows. This was a woman who took pride in her appearance, but was not driven by fashion. And there was another thing that Mma Ramotswe noticed: Mma Sebina spoke with a certain reticence, which suggested that she was ready to stop if the person to whom she was speaking had something more important, more pertinent, to say. That was always a good sign, Mma Ramotswe thought. Too many people were determined to blurt out their views even if the person being addressed knew much more about the subject under discussion. Reticence was a good sign.

  Mma Ramotswe straightened the pad before her on the desk and reached for a pencil. “You wrote to me, Mma,” she said. “You said that you hoped that I would be able to trace some family members for you. And the answer is yes, we can do that sort of thing. We are always doing it, aren’t we, Mma Makutsi?”

  Mma Sebina turned to look at Mma Makutsi, who smiled at her encouragingly. “Yes,” said Mma Makutsi. “We are experts at finding people, Mma We have found many, many people—including some who did not want to be found.”

  Mma Ramotswe nodded. “Usually, though, we’re looking for somebody who is quite happy to be found.” She paused. “Tell me, Mma: Who is this relative you are looking
for?”

  For a moment Mma Sebina looked puzzled, as if wondering why Mma Ramotswe should have missed something obvious. “But I don’t know, Mma. That’s the whole point. I have come to see you because I do not know.”

  “You do not know what, Mma?”

  It was at this point that Mma Makutsi decided to intervene.

  “She does not know the name of the relative. That can happen when a woman marries and changes her name. You may not meet the new husband and you may forget what his name is. It is easy to forget the name of a man.”

  A short silence followed this remark. Mma Ramotswe did not object to her assistant’s joining in a conversation with a client, but she rather wished that she would wait until asked for her opinion, as her interjections could sometimes distract the client and lead the conversation off in a strange direction. Mma Makutsi could also be tactless at times; on one occasion she had tut-tutted when a client had been telling Mma Ramotswe about something he had done. That had not helped, as the client had become sullen and taciturn, and Mma Ramotswe had been obliged to reassure him not only that everything he said in the office would remain confidential, but also that neither she nor Mma Makutsi would take it upon themselves to criticise his actions. “It is not for us, Rra,” she had said, all the while looking at Mma Makutsi, “to make you feel guilty. It is not for us.”

  Mma Makutsi had nodded. “God will do that,” she interjected. “He is the one who will judge you.”

  That had been an awkward consultation, and later Mma Ramotswe had felt obliged to discuss the issue with Mma Makutsi and remind her of the need for professional detachment. “It is fully discussed by Mr. Clovis Andersen in The Principles of Private Detection,” she had said. “You should perhaps read that section, Mma. Mr. Andersen says that you should not pass judgement on your client’s behaviour. If you do that, the client might wonder if you are really on his side.”

  Mma Makutsi had defended herself. “But I was not passing judgement on him,” she said. “I said that God would do that. You heard me, Mma. That is what I said.”

  At least now there was no such exchange. Mma Makutsi’s suggestion was reasonable enough—women did change their names when they married and that could cause confusion. But Mma Sebina was shaking her head.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think you understand me, Bomma. I have not forgotten the names of these people. I do not know who they are. I do not even know whether they exist, although I hope they do.”

  Mma Ramotswe twirled the pencil round in her fingers. HB: medium-soft lead. It was the sort of pencil that tended to become blunt rather too quickly for her liking. Twirling a pencil, HB or otherwise, was helpful: it enabled one to do something while one was thinking.

  “So you do not know who they are?” she mused. “I suppose that can happen. If you have a very large family there must be cousins you don’t know about. I think I might have such cousins somewhere.”

  “Usually such relatives turn up when they need something,” ventured Mma Makutsi. “Since I became engaged, Mma Sebina, I have found cousins who are very friendly. It is strange that they have not been friendly before, but now they must have realised that they wanted to be friendly all along.”

  Mma Ramotswe decided that this would need a word of explanation. “Mma Makutsi has recently become engaged to Mr. Phuti Radiphuti,” she said. “He is—”

  “The owner of the Double Comfort Furniture Shop,” supplied Mma Sebina. “I have seen him.”

  Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi exchanged glances. If it had been disconcerting for Mma Ramotswe to discover that Mma Sebina knew all about her, then it was now Mma Makutsi’s turn to be surprised. But it was not discomfort that she felt, but a certain degree of pride that she was engaged to a man of position, and known to people, to strangers, as such. There were those who might laugh at Phuti’s name, or indeed at the man himself; but he was a well-known businessman, and that counted for something.

  “That is him,” she said. “That is our store.”

  Mma Ramotswe drew in her breath, momentarily shocked by Mma Makutsi’s claim. She might be marrying into the Double Comfort Furniture Shop, but she was not yet the Double Comfort Furniture Shop itself. Indeed, technically the store still belonged to Phuti’s father, even if the old man spent most of his time these days sleeping. You still own something when you are asleep, she felt like pointing out to Mma Makutsi, but did not. Mma Ramotswe was generous; if it meant so much to Mma Makutsi that she should be thought of as the owner of a store, then what harm was there in that? Her assistant had started life with nothing, or next to nothing, and if she now had something, then that was entirely due to hard work on her part. There had been the Botswana Secretarial College, where she had performed at a stellar level, and then there had been the dancing classes at which she had persisted with Phuti, a most unpromising dance partner, even when he trod on her toes and stammered so badly that she could hardly make out what he was trying to say. No, Mma Makutsi deserved every bit of status to which she laid claim; she deserved this far more than many of those more glamorous people did, those glamorous people who found that everything tumbled into their laps simply because they were good-looking or knew people who would help them. She knew of so many cases like that: the nephew of a chief finding a good job in Gaborone above those better qualified than he was; the son of a mining manager being given a job with a company that made parts for the mining industry; and so on. It had never been like that for Mma Makutsi.

  Mma Sebina nodded. “And it is a very fine store, Mma.” She turned back to face Mma Ramotswe. “No, I wouldn’t mind it at all if some cousins were to get in touch,” she continued. “Even if they were greedy and just wanted money from me. I would still like to have some cousins. You see, Mma, I have no family.”

  She spoke without self-pity, as one might observe that one had run out of tea, or small change, or something of that nature.

  Mma Ramotswe put the pencil down on her desk. “They are all late? That is terrible, Mma. That is very sad. These days—”

  Mma Sebina raised a hand to stop her. “No, it is not that. They are not late—or some of them are, but the others may or may not be. I don’t know.” She paused. “I should tell you my story, Mma Ramotswe. Then you will understand.”

  Mma Ramotswe signalled to Mma Makutsi to put on the kettle. The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.

  “WHAT’S THE EARLIEST you can remember?” began Mma Sebina. And then, without waiting for an answer, she continued: “I can remember being four, Mma Ramotswe, but nothing before that. I can remember seeing a car in a ditch being pulled out by a tractor. And then the tractor ran over a chicken.

  “Then I remember nothing else about being four, and suddenly I’m five and it is time to go to Sunday school. I was taken to Sunday school by my mother and she used to come back to fetch me hours later, or it seemed like hours. We were given little stamps which we stuck in our books. Pictures of Jesus walking on the water and things like that. I remember looking at that picture of the walking on the water for a long time—I loved it so much, and I still do, Mma. I still have that picture.”

  Mma Ramotswe nodded. She understood. She, too, had pictures that she loved: her picture, printed on a plate, of Sir Seretse Khama, the first President of Botswana, that great man; she loved that picture because the expression on his face said so much to her. It was a gentle face, the face of a man who believed in his country and had stood up for what it represented, which was decency above all else; just that—decency. When she looked at that picture, it was as if he was still there: the late President, still watching over his country. And how proud he would be if he really could see it today, she thought; how proud.

  “For most people it doesn’t matter if they forget what happened before they were four,” Mma Sebina continued. “That is because they know that it was not very much. But in my case it’s different, Mma. That’s when everything happened. But I cannot rem
ember any of it.

  “I can see that you’re puzzled, Mma, and I can understand why. My mother, you see, the lady I called my mother a little bit earlier—she was not really my mother. I was the daughter of another woman altogether and that kind lady, my mother, and her kind husband, my father, who was not really my father, took me in and raised me as their own child.

  “That, of course, is a very common thing, Mma. There are many people who are the child of one mother but raised by another. Their mother may become late—that is a very common reason for this sort of thing—or may be too poor to bring up children. There are many reasons why a sister or an aunt may bring up the child of another woman. Or a grandmother, of course. As you know, that is not at all unusual.”

  She paused, and Mma Ramotswe, reaching for her pencil, sighed. “It is almost the rule, these days, Mma. What with this illness and everything. Where would we be without the grandmothers?”

  Mma Sebina agreed. “You are right. The grandmothers are the pillars. They are the ones. But most of these children who are brought up by the grandmothers know who they are. They know that their grandmother is their grandmother and that their mother was such-and-such and their father was this man or that man. But I do not know even the brothers and sisters of the kind people who brought me up. I know nothing, Mma. Nothing.” She looked down at the floor; the composure that she had shown earlier on was slipping. Now there was a note to her voice that suggested that not far beneath the surface there was a well of emotion and, beyond that, tears. “I do not have a birth certificate, Mma. I do not even have that.”

  Mma Ramotswe raised an eyebrow. “So what do you have on your omang?” All Batswana had an omang, the identity card which established their citizenship. The Setswana word omang meant who? and that was the question which the omang answered.

  “My omang says that I was born on the thirtieth of September,” said Mma Sebina. “I used to be proud of that. I used to be proud of the fact that my birthday was the same day as Botswana Day, that I was born on the same day as our country. But now I know that this is just because they did not know when my real birthday was. So you see, Mma, I would like you to find me a birthday. Please find me a birthday, and find me some people.”